On April 3, 1895, a 21-year-old student named Blanche Lamont left her aunt's house in San Francisco's Mission District for school and did not come home. Eleven days later, on Easter Sunday, police found her body at the top of the unfinished bell tower of Emmanuel Baptist Church, the congregation she attended. They had searched the building because, the day before, women decorating the church for Easter had found the body of another young member, Minnie Williams, in a small room off the church library.
Both young women knew Theodore Durrant, a 23-year-old medical student who was assistant superintendent of the church's Sunday school, an usher and the member who kept the church's electric gas lighters in repair. Witnesses placed him with Blanche Lamont on streetcars and outside the church on the afternoon she vanished, and with Minnie Williams near the church on the night she died. He was arrested on Easter Sunday while on duty with a militia signal corps near Mount Diablo.
Durrant was tried only for the death of Blanche Lamont. A San Francisco jury convicted him of first-degree murder on November 1, 1895, and the Supreme Court of California affirmed the conviction in 1897 in an opinion holding that the prosecution did not have to prove a motive. After a long series of appeals, he was hanged at San Quentin on January 7, 1898. He was charged with the murder of Minnie Williams but never tried for it, and he denied both killings on the gallows.
William Henry Theodore Durrant was born in Toronto, Canada, the son of William Allan Durrant, a shoemaker, and Isabella Matilda Durrant. His mother told the trial jury that she and her husband had married in Toronto on June 30, 1870, and that the family arrived in San Francisco on December 8, 1879. His father worked in the shoe trade in both cities. Durrant gave his age as 24 when he testified in the autumn of 1895, which puts his birth in about 1871. A historian of the family, Carol Bishop-Gwyn, writes that the Durrants left Toronto during an economic depression.
There were two children. His younger sister, born in Toronto in 1873 according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, appears in the trial record under her family name as a piano student; their mother testified that the daughter had sailed for Berlin on February 14, 1895, to continue her piano studies. She later became internationally known as the dancer Maud Allan.
In San Francisco the family moved several times, first to Hayes Valley and later to 1025 Fair Oaks Street in the Mission District, where they had lived for about seven years by 1895. As children, Theodore and his sister were boarded for about six months in Santa Rosa for the girl's health, their mother said. Durrant attended the Lincoln School, completed a three-year course at the Cogswell Polytechnic School and in 1895 was a senior at Cooper Medical College, preparing a thesis for a December graduation. During school vacations for eight or nine years he had worked at the Golden Rule Bazaar on Market Street, and he took on electrical jobs for private clients.
The family were church people. When they arrived from Toronto they joined the Metropolitan Temple, and later followed its successor congregation until Emmanuel Baptist Church was built on Bartlett Street about five years before the murders. From then on, his mother testified, her son attended every service and social. He also belonged to the California militia's signal corps.
Emmanuel Baptist stood on the east side of Bartlett Street between 22nd and 23rd Streets, in the Mission District. A police engineer who measured it for the trial found that 105 stair risers separated the basement from the top landing of the belfry, which was still unfinished in 1895 and reached through a door in the gallery. A small library sat at the front of the building, to the left of the main entrance, with a closet-sized inner room. The congregation's pastor was George Gibson, called Dr. Gibson in the trial record.
Durrant had unusual access to the building. The organist, George R. King, then 19, testified that only he and Durrant held keys to the library, and that the two of them had fitted a second lock to its door on the Saturday before April 3, using a lock Durrant brought from home. Durrant also had a key to the side door, which opened from a gated yard on the south side of the church. The janitor, Frank Sademan, and the president of the Ladies' Aid Society held the only other side-door keys King knew of. The church's young people met in the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor, of which Durrant was an officer, and in the homes of members such as the dentist Thomas A. Vogel.
Blanche Lamont was born in Rockford, Illinois, and grew up in Dillon, Montana, where she lived with her parents for about ten years. In September 1894 she came to San Francisco, mainly for her health, according to her aunt, and lived with her mother's sister, Tryphena Noble, and her uncle, Charles G. Noble, at 209 21st Street. Her sister Maud, a year younger, lived with them and shared her room. At the trial Maud gave Blanche's age at her death as 21 and said one brother and two sisters survived her.
In San Francisco Blanche attended the Boys' High School and had just begun lectures at the Normal School on Powell Street, which trained teachers. After Christmas she began music lessons with a teacher who came to the house, and she played in the Grace Orchestra of a Methodist church on 21st Street. She went to Emmanuel Baptist's Sunday school and evening services and belonged to its Christian Endeavor society, usually in her sister's company. She weighed about 115 pounds when she arrived from Montana and somewhat more by spring, a sign, her sister suggested, that her health had improved. Durrant had walked her home from church, taken her and his sister to a concert and once walked with her in the park, but her aunt testified that Blanche had not gone out with him since the end of December 1894.
Mrs. Noble last saw her niece at about 8 a.m. on Wednesday, April 3, when Blanche left for school in a black dress and a large felt hat, carrying her books on a strap. A streetcar conductor who knew her as a regular passenger, Henry Shellmont, testified that she boarded his Larkin Street car at Ninth and Mission Streets at 8:42 that morning with a young man he later identified as Durrant. A medical student, Herman Schlageter, saw the two board the same car. Durrant himself never denied this part of the day. He said he had met Blanche by chance at 21st and Mission Streets, ridden with her as far as Sutter and Polk, and gone on to his college.
The prosecution's case for the afternoon rested on a chain of witnesses. Mary Vogel, who lived across Powell Street from the Normal School, said she watched a young man in a large soft hat wait outside the school from about 2:07 p.m. until classes let out, and then run to catch up with two girls as they reached the corner of Clay Street. A classmate of Blanche's, Minnie Bell Edwards, testified that as the two of them reached the Powell Street cable car at about 3 p.m., a young man raised his hat to Blanche and took the seat beside her on the outside bench of the car; Edwards later identified him as Durrant. Two more students, Alice Pleasant (by the trial, Mrs. Dorgan) and May Lanigan, said they saw Blanche on a Powell Street car a few minutes later with Durrant beside her, the two of them looking at a book.
An elderly acquaintance of Durrant's, Elizabeth Crossett, testified that at about 3:30 she saw him with a tall young woman on a Valencia Street car, and that the pair got off at 21st or 22nd Street and walked toward Bartlett. Martin Quinlan, a lawyer who lived nearby, said that a little after 4 p.m. a young man and a young woman carrying what looked like a bundle of books passed him at the corner of 22nd and Bartlett, walking toward the church; he identified the man as Durrant, whom he knew by sight from the neighborhood. Caroline Leake, a church member of many years who lived almost opposite the building, testified that between 4 and 4:30 she saw Durrant, whom she had known for three or four years, open the church's south gate for a young woman and follow her in. She could not see the woman's face and said only that it was Blanche Lamont or another tall girl of the congregation, Edna Turner. Miss Turner testified that she had not been with Durrant that day or at the church at all.
George King arrived at the church at about 5 p.m. He said he smelled gas, checked a fixture he had recently installed in the library, and then sat down to play the piano in the Sunday school room. After a few minutes, Durrant came through the folding doors without his coat and hat, his hair disordered, looking so pale that King asked what was wrong. Durrant said he had been repairing the gas burners above the auditorium ceiling and had been overcome by the fumes. He gave King 50 cents to buy bromo seltzer at a drugstore on Valencia Street, and King did so. The janitor, Frank Sademan, later testified that the electric lighters had been in perfect order on April 3.
That evening Mrs. Noble went to the Wednesday prayer meeting, worried that Blanche had not come home. Durrant, sitting in front of her, turned and asked whether Blanche would be there, mentioned that he had ridden with her that morning, and said he had forgotten to bring a book she had asked to borrow, The Newcomes. Mrs. Noble did not tell him Blanche was missing. Two days later he brought the book to the house.
The Nobles reported Blanche missing, and the newspapers published her disappearance. On Friday, April 5, Detective A. Anthony went to the Normal School and heard from her classmates about the young man on the Powell Street car. Durrant meanwhile took part in the search. On Monday, April 8, he called on the Nobles with Dr. Vogel. Mrs. Noble remembered him saying, as he left, that Blanche was so good that she believed everyone else was good too, and might have been lured away or trapped because of it; he told Maud that if she wanted friends she should come to Emmanuel Baptist Church. A few days after the disappearance he told Schlageter, his fellow student, that he believed Blanche might have been drawn into a brothel because she was so innocent.
A pawnbroker on Dupont Street, Adolph Oppenheim, later testified that on a morning between April 4 and April 10 Durrant offered him a small gold ring set with diamond chips, which he declined to buy as nearly worthless. The ring was one that Maud Lamont had lent her sister. On Saturday morning, April 13, the postman brought Mrs. Noble a small package. Inside, wrapped in a page of the San Francisco Examiner, were the three rings Blanche had been wearing when she left the house. The names of George King and of Blanche's music teacher were written on the newspaper.
Minnie Flora Williams, sometimes called Marian, was the eldest child of Albert E. Williams and his wife. Her parents separated, and the members of Emmanuel Baptist raised enough money to send her mother and the younger children back to the family's former home in Canada. Minnie chose to stay in California and support herself. She was small, weighing a little over 90 pounds, and was 21 years old. Edgar Peixotto, the assistant prosecutor who later wrote the trial history, described her as cheerful and of good conduct. She had worked as a household servant in Alameda, then in the casket factory of Clark H. Morgan, and later lived in the Morgans' home as a companion to Mrs. Morgan. She had come to know both Durrant and Blanche Lamont through the church.
On Friday, April 12, Good Friday, she was moving from the Morgans' house to lodgings with a Mrs. A. D. Voy at 1707 Howard Street in San Francisco. She sent her trunk ahead, had her hair done, and planned to attend the Christian Endeavor social at Dr. Vogel's house that evening. She reached Mrs. Voy's before dinner and left afterward for the social, but she never arrived.
What is known of Durrant's movements that day comes from the trial record and from the prosecution's summary of the case it never tried. In the afternoon two fellow medical students, Charles Dukes and Clarence Dodge, met him at the ferry building at the foot of Market Street. He told them he was waiting for members of the signal corps for a trip to Mount Diablo, and asked them to answer for him at the next day's roll call so that he would not be marked absent. At the trial he admitted making that request. Sademan, the janitor, saw him at the ferry at about 4 p.m. and was told that Durrant was following up a report that Blanche had been seen crossing the bay.
That evening, at about 9:30, Durrant arrived at the Christian Endeavor social at Dr. Vogel's house after the business meeting had ended. According to the prosecution's summary, he was perspiring, his hair was untidy, and he asked to wash his hands before joining the games. He went home with a group of young people.
On Saturday morning, April 13, the janitor's son told the pastor that the library door had been forced. Dr. Gibson found nothing missing and assumed that Durrant or King had broken the lock to reach the books. Later that morning several women of the church arrived to decorate for Easter. Looking for books in the library, they opened the door of the small inner room and found Minnie Williams's body. The coroner's autopsy found that she had been killed and that she had been stabbed repeatedly with a table knife from the church, broken in the attack.
That night, Detective E. L. Gibson and two police sergeants searched the church by candlelight. They found the door to the belfry with its handle missing and the casing marked by a tool, and they could not open it. Since it was a church, Gibson later explained, they chose to wait until morning rather than break the door.
At about 9:30 on Easter Sunday morning, April 14, Gibson, Officer A. B. Reihl and the janitor forced the belfry door. Climbing the stairs, Gibson saw a body in the southeast corner of the top landing. It was Blanche Lamont. She had been laid out on her back without her clothing, her hands folded across her chest and her head propped on two small blocks of wood. Her clothes were later found hidden among the rafters and elsewhere in the tower. Her uncle identified her at the scene. The autopsy physician, Dr. J. S. Barrett, found that she had been strangled by hand and had been dead for about two weeks.
Durrant had left San Francisco on April 13 with the signal corps. Detective Anthony arrested him in Contra Costa County, about six miles above Walnut Creek on the road toward Mount Diablo, drove him by buggy to Walnut Creek and brought him to San Francisco by train. A reporter for the Examiner interviewed him at about 8 p.m. that Sunday in the booking room of the city prison, where Durrant gave the account of the morning streetcar ride that he repeated at trial. The California Supreme Court opinion dates the arrest to April 15, but the trial testimony places him in the city prison on the evening of April 14.
On Monday, April 15, the three Normal School students were brought to the chief of police's office. Durrant was walked in, and all three identified him as the man on the Powell Street car. When the chief asked him whether he had anything to say, Edwards testified, he answered that he had not been there.
Sergeant William Burke searched the Durrant home and, according to the prosecution's summary, found Minnie Williams's purse in the pocket of a long overcoat. Durrant said he had found the purse on the street.
Separate coroner's juries named Durrant as responsible for both deaths. The Williams inquest came first. Police Judge Charles T. Conlan held separate preliminary hearings and, by May 3, 1895, had ordered him held without bail on both charges. On May 29 he was arraigned in the Superior Court on two charges of murder, gave his name as William Henry Theodore Durrant, and pleaded not guilty to each. The district attorney chose to try the Lamont case first because, Peixotto wrote, the chain of evidence in it was the most complete.
The case filled the San Francisco papers for months. Peixotto, writing in 1899, noted that the newspapers called it the "Crime of the Century." In a 2016 retrospective, the San Francisco Chronicle recalled that the press of the day labeled Durrant the "Demon of the Belfry" and compared him to Jack the Ripper. The defense argued from the start that such coverage made a fair trial in San Francisco impossible. Its motion for a change of venue was supported by affidavits that attached many of the published articles and drawings. The court received about two dozen counter-affidavits from citizens and denied the motion on July 25, 1895.
Durrant himself made the same complaint on the gallows, blaming the San Francisco press for his conviction. The California Supreme Court later rejected the claim that newspaper coverage had made the trial unfair, though one justice wrote separately that a trial in a county far from that atmosphere would have been more satisfactory.
The trial opened on July 22, 1895, before Judge Daniel J. Murphy of the Superior Court of the City and County of San Francisco. District Attorney William S. Barnes and his assistant, Edgar D. Peixotto, prosecuted. General John H. Dickinson, Eugene N. Deuprey and A. W. Thompson defended. Crowds gathered daily around the city hall, Peixotto recorded, though without any demonstration against the defendant.
Choosing a jury took more than a month. Testimony from the preliminary hearings had been printed in full, and many men were excused because they had formed opinions or would not impose death on circumstantial evidence. By the close of the 22nd day of trial, August 29, 490 men had been examined in the jury box. The twelve jurors were merchants, a banker, a bookseller, a stable keeper, a carriage maker and two men of independent means. Warren Dutton served as foreman.
On September 3 Barnes made his opening statement and the jury toured the church. Testimony began the next day. The prosecution called the autopsy physician, the police officers who found the body, Blanche's aunt, uncle and sister, the streetcar conductor, the Normal School students, Mrs. Crossett, Quinlan, Mrs. Leake, King, Sademan and Oppenheim. To display Blanche's clothing, the prosecution placed it on a dressmaker's form in view of the jury. The defense objected without success, and the Supreme Court later upheld the ruling.
The defense opened its case on the 35th day of the trial. Deuprey promised to prove that Durrant had spent the afternoon of April 3 at Cooper Medical College, had attended Dr. William Fitz Cheney's lecture on infant feeding from 3:30 to about 4:15, and had answered the roll at its close. If that was true, Durrant could not have been on the Powell Street car at 3 p.m. or on the Valencia Street car at 3:30.
Dr. Cheney testified that a roll was called at the end of his lecture and that he believed it accurate, but under cross-examination he said he had no personal recollection of Durrant being there. The student who called the roll, Frank P. Gray, explained that only absences were marked; Durrant's name had no mark, so the book counted him present, but Gray could not say he had seen him.
Durrant testified in his own defense. He described the morning ride with Blanche, a walk at noon, a library visit and Cheney's lecture, and produced five pages of notes he said he had taken there. He said he then traveled alone to the church, arrived at about five minutes to five, took off his coat in the library, and climbed above the auditorium ceiling to adjust the electric lighter on one of the gas burners, where the escaping gas made him sick. He said he had never seen Blanche again after the morning.
The defense also called a man named Charles P. Lenahan, who said that he was the young man who had offered Oppenheim a chip-diamond ring in April; Oppenheim's own books dated that visit to April 13. In his closing argument Deuprey pointed to the pastor, Dr. Gibson. As summarized by Peixotto, Deuprey argued that a chisel found in the church fitted the marks on the belfry door and that the handwriting on the package of rings resembled Gibson's, and said that Gibson would have found himself in a difficult position had he been the one on trial.
The prosecution answered the alibi in rebuttal. A fellow student, Edward F. Glaser, testified that on April 10, a week after the lecture, he read his own notes of it aloud in a clinic room with Durrant present while Durrant wrote in his notebook. Dr. Gilbert F. Graham, another acquaintance, testified, as the Supreme Court later summarized, that Durrant had asked to borrow his notes and said that with them he could establish an alibi. Durrant denied asking for them on those terms. The prosecution also showed that classmates sometimes answered the roll for one another, and that Durrant had asked Dukes and Dodge to do exactly that for him on April 12.
On his own account, Durrant was in the church at about 5 p.m. on April 3, the same hour King found him pale and shaken there. The prosecution argued that the only person who came down from the upper part of the church that afternoon was Durrant.
Judge Murphy finished his charge to the jury at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, November 1, 1895. In his account Peixotto records that the jury was locked up about five minutes later, sent word after about 20 minutes that it had agreed, and filed back in as the clock struck four. Dutton read the verdict: guilty of murder in the first degree. Durrant showed no reaction; his mother embraced him. (Later retellings, including the Chronicle's, say the jury took about five minutes.)
The defense moved for a new trial, supported by many affidavits. Judge Murphy denied it on December 6, 1895, saying that he fully agreed with the verdict and believed the trial had been fair, and the sentence of death was pronounced.
The appeal record ran to three printed volumes and about 2,700 pages and was filed with the Supreme Court of California on July 29, 1896. On March 3, 1897, the court affirmed the conviction in an opinion by Justice Henshaw, People v. Durrant, 116 Cal. 179. It held that the circumstantial evidence was sufficient and that disputes about the credibility of witnesses were for the jury. It rejected objections to the jury panel, the challenges to individual jurors, the evidence rulings and the instructions. On motive, which the prosecution had never established, the court wrote that "proof of motive is never indispensable to a conviction," adding that the "well-springs of human conduct are infinite, and infinitely obscure." Justice McFarland concurred but wrote that a trial in a county far beyond the reach of the threatening atmosphere in San Francisco would have been more satisfactory.
Judge Murphy had by then left the bench, and Judge George H. Bahrs set the execution for June 11, 1897. The defense appealed that order to the state Supreme Court and went into federal court. A petition for habeas corpus was denied by the U.S. Circuit Court on June 2, 1897, and the defense appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Governor James H. Budd came to San Francisco to hear arguments for clemency and, in a written opinion, refused to intervene, but he granted a reprieve until the federal appeal was decided. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the denial of habeas corpus on November 8, 1897.
Judge Bahrs then set the execution for November 12. On November 11 the federal Circuit Court refused another petition, but the same afternoon the Supreme Court of California, sitting in Sacramento, granted a certificate of probable cause that stayed the hanging, because the trial court had acted before the U.S. Supreme Court's mandate arrived. Deuprey hired a launch to carry the order to the warden at San Quentin.
The defense then asked the Superior Court to set the Minnie Williams charge for trial. District Attorney Barnes opposed the motion, saying the state was content to rely on the judgment in the Lamont case. Judge Bahrs refused to set the case on November 19, 1897, and the Supreme Court of California denied a petition to compel a trial on November 30. On December 8 the state court decided the pending appeals against Durrant, and on December 15 Judge Bahrs set a fourth date: January 7, 1898.
In the last weeks the defense accused one juror, Horace Smythe, of having been influenced by information from outside the trial. Judge William T. Wallace heard the matter on December 28 and found that Smythe's reported remarks, made at a lunch party, dated from after the trial and amounted at most to gossip. Durrant's mother later sued Smythe for slander. The state Supreme Court refused another certificate on January 1, 1898, the federal judges refused further writs on January 5, and on January 6 Justice Brewer of the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.
Durrant had been attended in prison by a Protestant minister, Dr. Davis, but on the last morning he asked for Father Lagan, a Catholic priest who had visited him, and was baptized into the Catholic Church before he walked to the scaffold. On the gallows he said he bore no ill will except toward those who had hounded him to death for a crime he had not committed, that the San Francisco press had fastened the crime on him, and that he forgave everyone. He declared his innocence once more "before God."
Deputy Warden Amos Lunt carried out the hanging at San Quentin at 10:37 a.m. on January 7, 1898, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. In Washington that same morning, Durrant's lawyer, Louis P. Boardman, was presenting a final petition for habeas corpus to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices conferred and, by unanimous decision, refused leave to file it. Peixotto observed that the hanging was taking place even as the Court announced its decision. The ruling was published as In re Boardman, 169 U.S. 39 (1898). Chief Justice Fuller's opinion held that the federal court could not interfere with California's handling of stays when the only result of issuing the writ would be to return the prisoner to custody.
Durrant's parents stood by him throughout. In 1897, according to a 2018 history published by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, they arranged with an early filmmaker for a short motion picture to be made of their son inside San Quentin, to be exhibited for admission so that the proceeds could pay for his defense while the appeal was before the U.S. Supreme Court. Because prison rules barred cameras inside the walls, the prison directors had to issue a special order, and Durrant's father went to the prison with the camera operator. The film was later shown in San Francisco over the objections of Warden William E. Hale, whose daughter appeared in it.
After the hanging, Peixotto wrote, every cemetery in San Francisco refused to take Durrant's body, and the crematories refused as well. His parents finally found a crematory in Pasadena willing to accept it, and on January 13, 1898, the body was taken there and cremated. The Chronicle's 2016 retrospective reported that Isabella Durrant never doubted her son's innocence, that she was said to have eaten a meal in the room where his body lay after the execution, and that she kept a vigil for six days while his father searched for a crematory. These details come from the press of the time as retold in that account; the trial history does not include them.
Durrant's sister was in Berlin through the arrest, trial and appeals. According to Bishop-Gwyn, writing in Canada's History, their mother suggested that she come home to help pay for her brother's appeals, but she remained in Germany, determined to restore the family's standing through her own success. After learning of the execution she wrote that she herself could bear up, but asked how her poor parents could. Her father died in 1917 and her mother in 1930, Bishop-Gwyn writes.
Durrant's sister, born Beulah Maud Durrant (The Canadian Encyclopedia gives Ulla Maude Durrant), became known professionally as Maud Allan. She made her debut as a dancer in Vienna in 1903 and became a star in England, best remembered for her solo The Vision of Salome; she died in Los Angeles in 1956. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes that her brother's 1895 trial brought her unwanted notoriety. In 1918 she brought a libel case in London against a member of Parliament, Pemberton Billing. According to Bishop-Gwyn, she was made to confirm in court that Theodore Durrant had been her brother, and Pemberton Billing used the connection to suggest that bad blood ran in her family.
Blanche Lamont's sister Maud took her body home to Montana about three days after it was found, and the funeral was held the morning after she arrived. Minnie Williams's family lived in Canada, and the accounts of the case do not say where she was buried.
Emmanuel Baptist Church never shook off the case. According to the Chronicle's columnist Gary Kamiya, neighbors demanded that it be burned. It was not, but it was torn down in 1915.
The case produced a substantial literature. Edgar Peixotto, who had helped prosecute Durrant, published a Report of the Trial of William Henry Theodore Durrant in 1899, with long extracts of testimony, the closing arguments, the judge's charge, a history of the appeals and an appendix on the untried Williams case. As one of the prosecutors, he wrote from the state's side. The historian Virginia A. McConnell's book-length study, Sympathy for the Devil: The Emmanuel Baptist Murders of Old San Francisco, appeared in 2001. The 1897 San Quentin film, the CDCR notes, has its own place in the history of filming inside California prisons.
The Supreme Court's opinion in People v. Durrant set out the principle, in the case's own words, that proof of motive is never indispensable to a conviction.
The Williams charge was never tried. The evidence for it is known mainly from the prosecution's own summary, printed in Peixotto's appendix. That summary relies on a witness, Alexander Zenger, who came forward after the preliminary hearings and said he had seen Durrant and Minnie Williams enter the church's rear door on the night of April 12 and Durrant leave alone. Zenger never testified under oath and was never cross-examined. Other neighbors saw a couple near the church that night, but their identifications were uncertain. Her purse was reportedly found in Durrant's overcoat, which he explained by saying he had found it in the street. No blood was found on his clothing, which his defenders pointed to. Peixotto, as prosecutor, believed the Williams case had become stronger than the Lamont case, but no court ever tested it, and Durrant is accused, not convicted, of that death.
Durrant's guilt in the Lamont case rests on circumstantial evidence. No witness saw the killing, and no confession was made. The identifications of him on the afternoon streetcars were made after his picture had appeared in the newspapers, a point the defense stressed in cross-examination. Mrs. Leake could not say which tall young woman she saw. Against this stood the number of independent witnesses, the ring offered to Oppenheim, the rings returned to Mrs. Noble, King's account of finding Durrant pale and shaken in the church at about five o'clock, and the weakness of the alibi after Glaser's and Graham's testimony. The jury, the trial judge and every appellate court found the case sufficient.
The defense's suggestion that the pastor, Dr. Gibson, was responsible was an argument made to the jury, not a charge. It rested on the chisel marks and a claimed likeness in handwriting. The accounts of the case offer no evidence connecting Gibson to either death, and he was never charged.
No motive was proved. The prosecution never established one, and the Supreme Court held that it did not need to. Later writers have speculated about Durrant's private life and state of mind, but those claims, including rumors repeated in modern retellings, find no support in the trial record.
Durrant maintained his innocence on the gallows. Witnesses quoted by Peixotto thought the speech sounded rehearsed; that was their impression, not evidence either way.
Some details vary between accounts. Blanche Lamont's age is given as 21 in her sister's testimony and the Supreme Court opinion, and as 20 in some later retellings. Peixotto puts the jury's deliberation at about 20 minutes. The arrest is dated April 14 by the trial testimony and April 15 by the Supreme Court opinion. Some modern summaries call Blanche Durrant's fiancée; nothing in the trial record supports that, and her aunt testified that she had not gone out with him since December 1894.
June 30, 1870: William Allan Durrant and Isabella Matilda Durrant marry in Toronto.
About 1871: William Henry Theodore Durrant is born in Toronto.
1873: His sister, the future Maud Allan, is born in Toronto.
December 8, 1879: The family arrives in San Francisco.
About 1890: Emmanuel Baptist Church is built on Bartlett Street; the Durrants join.
September 1894: Blanche Lamont arrives from Dillon, Montana, to live with her aunt and uncle.
February 14, 1895: Durrant's sister leaves San Francisco to study piano in Berlin.
April 3, 1895: Blanche Lamont is seen with Durrant on streetcars in the morning and afternoon and entering the church grounds with a young man identified as Durrant; she does not return home.
April 4 to 10, 1895: According to the pawnbroker's testimony, Durrant offers him a ring belonging to the Lamont sisters.
April 8, 1895: Durrant visits the Nobles with Dr. Vogel.
April 12, 1895 (Good Friday): Minnie Williams leaves her lodgings for a church social and does not arrive.
April 13, 1895: Blanche's rings arrive by mail; church women find Minnie Williams's body in the library; Durrant leaves with the signal corps.
April 14, 1895 (Easter Sunday): Police find Blanche Lamont's body in the belfry; Durrant is arrested near Walnut Creek and held in the city prison by evening.
April 15, 1895: Normal School students identify Durrant at the police chief's office.
May 3, 1895: Durrant is held to answer on both murder charges.
May 29, 1895: Durrant is arraigned and pleads not guilty to both charges.
July 22, 1895: Trial on the Lamont charge opens before Judge Daniel J. Murphy.
August 29, 1895: The jury is completed after 490 men are examined.
September 4, 1895: Testimony begins.
November 1, 1895: The jury finds Durrant guilty of first-degree murder.
December 6, 1895: The motion for a new trial is denied, and the death sentence is pronounced.
March 3, 1897: The Supreme Court of California affirms the conviction (116 Cal. 179).
June 2, 1897: A federal court denies habeas corpus; the defense appeals.
1897: A short film of Durrant is made inside San Quentin.
November 8, 1897: The U.S. Supreme Court affirms the denial of habeas corpus.
November 11, 1897: The state Supreme Court stays the execution set for November 12.
November 19 and 30, 1897: Courts refuse defense requests to try the Minnie Williams charge.
December 15, 1897: The execution is set for January 7, 1898.
January 7, 1898: Durrant is hanged at San Quentin at 10:37 a.m.; the U.S. Supreme Court denies a final application the same morning.
January 13, 1898: Durrant's body is cremated at Pasadena.
1899: Edgar Peixotto publishes the trial report.
1915: Emmanuel Baptist Church is demolished.
1918: Maud Allan's libel case in London revives the family connection.